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Miscellanea & Thoughts on Er-Eret

I realized today that I hadn’t actually published the posts that I finished. They’re up now! What follows is bonus miscellanea for my own benefit as well as those of you who’re bored enough to read my shit.

Acquisitions

I picked up the Daeva Clanbook. It basically follows the standard set by the Ventrue book, which is to say that it’s glossy, full-colored, and attractive.

I’ve read through the first fifty or so pages of Silver Ladder and it’s great. I want to run Mage again, except I have to take care of D&D first.

Prep

In terms of D&D, I’ve been iterating on how the next session will shape up. I have no shortage of ideas for some things, which is actually a great spot to be in. I love it! The challenge is picking the good ideas, working on ’em, and then working on those areas that aren’t so easy.

I think I did myself a real favor by running as many one-shots as I did over the last few months. I’m much more comfortable with the process of laying this stuff out in a practical way. Previously, I would sort of dabble in ideas that wouldn’t actually come up in the first few sessions. This is useful to me in the sense that I have a grip on the world, but it doesn’t bring me any closer to being able to run the game.

Now I feel much more comfortable with this process. I have a much better idea of what sorts of things I need to know, though of course I can’t cover everything. Modulo that last bit, it’s actually a lot like giving a presentation. I think I just had to go through it a bunch of times before I realized that on an intuitive level.

Looking ahead

The main challenge I’m facing now is party coherence. There are a lot of agendas.

Now, I can easily finish one arc with this, because there are a variety of ways to motivate people who are mostly unconnected, in the short term. You can attack them all at once. You can trap them someplace. You can create one solution to each of their problems. (If you think about it, a lot of these are the same.) There are plenty of other ways, I’m sure.

In the medium-term, they’re all in a confined space, the town of Er-Eret. The caravan has to go back home at some point, but PCs uninterested in staying in Er-Eret are stuck until that happens.

This is good in the sense that the PCs can’t just run off in five different directions. This isn’t the same as having something to do, and whatever that “something to do” is depends greatly on the ending. And to be honest I don’t have a definitive ending planned out.

Oh crap. Sorry, Evan! Spoiler! I don’t have an ending!

Endings

I have some events that will happen to people. I have plot arcs for nearly every PC. And I have something I’m pushing for, event-wise, that will basically be the logical conclusion of a bunch of stuff. That’s honestly good enough for me.

My Mage game is an interesting contrast. Although it withered before I could finish it, I still have the inclination to somehow finish it, so I will keep details vague. In fact, I just got an idea of how I could finish it. Ooh, that’s interesting.

Anyway, for Lover’s Leap, I did have an ending in mind, and it was fairly vivid, though admittedly it took a lot of iterating in order to arrive at the final version in my head. Aside from that, it was fairly similar in structure as it related to the PCs relationship to the world: events moved independent of the PCs, though they were of course involved in them. I also had plot arcs for everyone. Yay!

TTFN

I should probably indulge in some of that prep I was talking about above, even if it’s just to write down the thoughts I’ve come up with. Hopefully this is enough content to make up for having neglected to post this weekend.

The only thing I can really offer in my defense is that it was my birthday, which I’ll admit isn’t the worst excuse anyone has ever used.